Buy side

For most of this year, the municipal bond market has been buttressed by cash coming out of hiding.

Nearly all The Bond Buyer’s weekly yield indexes declined this week amid fairly light trading activity in the secondary market and ahead of tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Investors last week handed municipal bond mutual funds the puniest slug of cash in seven months, cementing the slower trend of new money flowing to the industry.

With the Thanksgiving holiday on the menu, issuers, underwriters, and bankers have very few deals scheduled to take place during the shortened trading week.

Just because money’s on the sidelines doesn’t mean it’s out of the game.

Most of The Bond Buyer’s yield indexes declined this week, as the municipal market grew firmer over the past several sessions in the last full week of activity prior to the Thanksgiving holiday.

Outflows of $2 billion caused tax-exempt money market funds to decline to $409.57 billion for the week ending Nov. 16, according to the Money Fund Report, a service of iMoneyNet.com.

Investors in municipal credit need to make an important distinction between rated government bodies and unrated speculative credits, analysts from Fitch Ratings said at a conference yesterday.

Invesco Ltd. today launches an exchange-traded fund designed to track the performance of taxable Build America Bonds — a potentially transformative product that has helped galvanize public finance in 2009.

Two deals over $1 billion — one in New York and one in California — will vie for investors’ attention this week as the largest being priced, as activity begins to slow down ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday next week.

Municipal bond mutual funds last week continued to command new money at a pace that was still high but not quite as high as earlier this year.

The Bond Buyer’s weekly yield indexes were mixed during this holiday-shortened week.

Parents picking a charter school for their children want a school they can be confident will not close down. Bondholders want much the same thing.

On the heels of hefty outflows last week, the assets of tax-exempt money market funds dipped by just $649.8 million to settle at $411.57 billion for the week ending Nov. 9, according to the Money Fund Report, a service of iMoneyNet.com.

Brightening economic prospects and improving liquidity helped lift the municipal bond market in the third quarter in spite of numerous credit concerns and the evisceration of the bond insurance industry, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s quarterly report on municipal credit.

The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has forced many state and local government budgets into a widely publicized vise.

David Rubin, founder of CDR Financial Products Inc., and two colleagues on Friday pleaded not guilty to criminal antitrust, wire fraud and other charges stemming from an alleged conspiracy to rig bids for municipal investment agreements and derivatives contracts for kickbacks.

For the third week in a row, a California issuer will dominate the primary market spotlight with a $1.5 billion financing.

Investors bequeathed another more modest sum of cash to municipal bond mutual funds last week, offering further evidence that the blitz of new money barraging the industry has eased to a more moderate pace.

At least one demographic is yet to trumpet the end of the recession: local governments.